Out 1, usually dismissed as unwatchable, has remained hardly more than a rumor.
Fittingly, the New York Times labled it the "cinephile's holy grail", "a true
phantom film whose reputation rests on its unattainability", the Guardian
called it the "hardcore cinephile's Bigfoot", only to add that "part of the
film's appeal lies in being able to boast that you've seen it", and since Out 1
hasn't been screened more than once or twice every decade, nobody seems to have
realized that it is not yet another long and boring Rivette film, in fact not
even a film at all, but nothing less than the Great Lost French Post May 68 TV
Series. It is undoubtedly odd that it has taken almost half a century -- and
the recent renaissance of the television series, outside its original medium,
as the cinematic long-form equivalent of the novel -- until it has become
possible to least acknowledge the very genre of this mysterious film object
(given that it was commissioned and subsequently rejected by French television,
given that its structure is classically episodic, and given that each episode
even begins with a set of black and white stills that recapitulates key moments
of the previous one) ... but finally, here we are. And now that binge watching
has become both technologically feasible and socially acceptable, Jacques
Rivette's and Suzanne Schiffman's work may actually have a bright future.

Yes, it's true that Out 1 opens with an almost uncut theater improvisation
scene that takes fifty minutes to develop from yoga into orgy. Yes, it's true
that Out 1 has zero plot until the beginning of episode three, only exposition,
and that what follows doesn't follow any script. Yes, it's true that Out 1 is a
political action thriller that is void of any action until around episode five.
And yes, it's called "Out" because Rivette hated everything that was "in", a
term that had become very much en vogue in France at the time, it's called "Out
1" because he thought he might do even more of it, and it's called "Out 1: noli
me tangere" because he wanted to make sure that no-one would ever dare to touch
the final version, which has a runtime of twelve and a half hours. (Actually,
that's exactly what he tried to do himself in 1974, but the four-hour "Out 1:
Spectre" is in fact just yet another long and boring Rivette film.) However,
once you've gotten a hang of the series' modus operandi, Out 1 will reveal
itself as the unforeseen culmination and subsequent psychedelic capsizing of an
entire generation of French political cinema, including what feels like a full
remake of Godard's "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle" (with half of "La
chinoise" thrown in for good measure), complete with mad traffic noise and a
new palette of primary colors, featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mute-deaf
beggar with harmonica and Juliet Berto as a small-time hustler and con-artist,
both drifting through the cafés of Paris, constantly looking for new victims.

The plot itself is actually quite simple: While two underground theater groups
are rehearsing two Greek tragedies, "Prometheus Bound" and "Seven Against
Thebes" by Aeschylus, Léaud and Berto independently begin to discover a
conspiracy based on Balzac's trilogy "The History of the Thirteen", until
Leaud's findings lead him to a strange thrift store named "L'angle du hazard",
from where on it becomes increasingly clear that the two theater troupes are
one and the same, and that the sleeper cell of the Thirteen is about to wake
up. There's no danger of spoiling the ending though: the resolution of the plot
will be its gradual dissolution, and just like the two groups at its center,
the story itself will eventually just spiral out of control. The last two
episodes feel like diving down the deep and dark plot holes of a psychedelic,
poststructuralist precursor to the (still decidedly structuralist) second
season of Twin Peaks, approximately at the point where the dialogue begins to
be played backwards. But while the series may deliberately lose its sense of
direction, it never loses the energy that drives it forward, and its approach
to form and dynamics recalls the structure of something like a Doors song, in
this case a twelve and a half hour version of "The End" that just doesn't want
to end. (The notes from our last viewing suggest that it could also be a
Spacemen 3 song, most likely a twelve and a half hour version of "Revolution"
that doesn't want to end either.) Of course we weren't there, but Claire Denis
spent a day on the set and said the whole thing reminded her of an acid trip.

Obviously, the series is set in the aftermath of May 68 in Paris. The walls are
still covered with graffiti, everyday life is still entirely political, the
main characters are not individuals, but collectives, and Out 1 captures the
moment just before these communes begin to drift into isolation, confusion and
paranoia. This is clearly the moment when Godard made "Tout va bien" and "Ici
et ailleurs", the onset of political depression, even though Out 1 remains more
"ici" than "ailleurs", except for a small number of scenes that hint at the
existence of an outside world. And this is clearly the moment when Deleuze and
Guattari wrote the "Anti-Oedipe", it's evident that both Marx and Freud will
have to be turned upside down to remain useful for revolutionary politics, and
the settings and tropes of Out 1 suggest that Rivette fully anticipated, if not
already articulated, the coming program of schizo-politics. Admittedly, at
first it may seem as if someone didn't get the memo: in Out 1, not only the
subconscious is structured like a theater (and not like a factory, as Deleuze
and Guattari would soon point out), but in fact most of conscious life is
taking place in an actual theater, literally rehearsing Oedipus. Still, once
the function of the theater has become clearer -- the utopian place within the
existing order of the social that allows for play and transformation -- one
can, if one is so inclined, make out the lines of flight, the interlocked
processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, hints at the "Body
without Organs", examples of "becoming", and a fair share of its very opposite.

Of course, it is not our intention to advertise Out 1 as a two-day introductory
course to "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", even if it may be the most overtly
Deleuzian television series ever conceived. But that's not the full story. It's
a series about revolution in which hardly anyone ever talks about politics.
It's a series about terrorism without any trace of government or police. It's a
series about society that is void of love stories, families or domestic drama.
It's a series about madness where madness is never personal. It's a series
about bodies that works with astonishingly little nudity. And it's a series
about colors most of which we haven't even mentioned yet, like the fullscreen
red and green of the cafés and bars, the bright pink and orange of the thrift
store, or the very 16 mm blue and yellow of the beach where, for reasons beyond
our immediate understanding, half of the cast ends up in the final episode. At
the same time, it's a series about cinema that is more "Cicatrice interieure"
than Garrel's and even less "Un film comme les autres" than the piece that
Godard used this title for. It's not an oedipal hippie drama, even if it may
invite you to mistake it for one, and we can say with certainty that it's not
too long. In short, Out 1 is what television could have been in the 1970s, but
instead, it has suffered several decades of censorship at the hands of clueless
producers, incompetent distributors and misguided cinephiles who prefer true
masterpieces of cinema to be rare, lost, or otherwise unaccessible. So if we
can make at least a small contribution to putting an end to this misery, then
we're actually rather confident that we're not wasting our time this weekend.

Needless to say, while this an invitation to watch the entire series with us,
you're also very much welcome to just visit Prⅳate Cinema for a drink or two.
It is also our last screening this season. Thanks for coming, and more soon.